The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford — Volume 4 eBook

(752) M. Bailly, the learned astronomer. He
was president of the first National Assembly, and
in July 1789, appointed mayor of Paris; in which situation
he gave great offence to the people, in July 1791,
by ordering martial law to be proclaimed against a
mob which had assembled in the Champ de Mars to frame
an address, recommending the deposition of Louis.
For this step, which was approved of by the Assembly,
he was arrested, tried, condemned, and put to death
on the 11th of November 1793. The details of
this event are horrible. “The weather,”
says M. Thiers, “was cold and rainy, Conducted
on foot, he manifested the utmost composure amidst
the insults of a barbarous populace, whom he had fed
while he +was mayor. On reaching the foot of
the scaffold, one of the wretches cried out, that
the field of’ the federation ought not to be
polluted by his blood. The people instantly
rushed upon the guillotine, bore it off, and erected
it again upon a dunghill on the bank of the Seine,
and opposite to the spot where Bailly had passed his
life and composed his invaluable works. This
operation lasted some hours: meanwhile, he was
compelled to walk several times round the Champ de
Mars, bareheaded, and with his hands pinioned behind
him. Some pelted him with mud, others kicked
and struck him with sticks. He fell exhausted.
They lifted him up again. ‘Thou tremblest!’
said a soldier to him. ‘My friend,’
replied the old man, ‘it is cold.’
At length he was delivered over to the executioner;
and another illustrious scholar, and one of the most
virtuous of men, was then taken from it.”
Vol. iii. p. 207-E.

(753) See post, p. 484.-E.

(754) Mr. Gifford was of Walpole’s opinion,
and has, in consequence, accorded to " The Charming-man”
a prominent situation in the Baviad:—­

To the poem here alluded to, and which was entitled
“Peace, Ignominy, and Destruction,” the
satirist thus alludes:-"I thought I understood something
of faces; but I must read my Lavater over again I
find. That a gentleman, with the physionomie
\2d’un mouton qui r`eve,’ should suddenly
start up a new Tyrtaeus, and pour a dreadful note,
through a cracked war-trump, amazes me: well,
fronti nulla fides shall henceforth be my motto’
In a note to the Pursuits of Literature, Mr. Mathias
directs the attention of Jerningham to the following
beautiful lines in Dryden’s Epistle to Mr. Julien,
Secretary of the Muses:—­

“All his care
Is to be thought a Poet fine and fair;
Small beer and gruel are his meat and drink,
The diet he prescribes himself to think;
Rhyme next his heart he takes at morning peep,
Some love-epistles at the hour of sleep;
And when his passion has been bubbling long,
The scum at last boils Up into a song.” —­E.